Midnights Children

partition of the state of Bombay.
    To begin at the beginning: her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless—they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her dreadfully when she ate ice-cream. (I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.)
    Racked by toothaches, my Evie rose magnificently above the pain. Refusing to be ruled by bone and gums, she ate cake and drank Coke whenever they were going; and never complained. A tough kid, Evie Burns: her conquest of suffering confirmed her sovereignty over us all. It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.
    Once, I shyly gave her a necklace of flowers (queen-of-the-night for my lily-of-the-eve), bought with my own pocket-money from a hawker-woman at Scandal Point. “I don’t wear flowers,” Evelyn Lilith said, and tossed the unwanted chain into the air, spearing it before it fell with a pellet from her unerring Daisy air-pistol. Destroying flowers with a Daisy, she served notice that she was not to be manacled, not even by a necklace: she was our capricious, whirligig Lill-of-the-Hill. And also Eve. The Adam’s-apple of my eye.
    How she arrived: Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil Sabarmati, Cyrus Dubash, the Monkey and I were playing French cricket in the circus-ring between Methwold’s four palaces. A New Year’s Day game: Toxy clapping at her barred window; even Bi-Appah was in a good humor and not, for once, abusing us. Cricket—even French cricket, and even when played by children—is a quiet game: peace anointed in linseed oil. The kissing of leather and willow; sprinkled applause; the occasional cry—“Shot! Shot, sir!”—“Ow
zatt??
” but Evie on her bicycle was having none of that.
    “Hey, you! Alla you! Hey, whassamatter? You all deaf or what?”
    I was batting (elegantly as Ranji, powerfully as Vinoo Mankad) when she charged up the hill on her two-wheeler, straw hair flying, freckles ablaze, mouth-metal flashing semaphore messages in the sunlight, a scarecrow astride a silver bullet … “Hey, you widda leaky nose! Stop watching the schoopid ball, ya crumb! I’ll showya something worth watching!”
    Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle; and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers, an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a silver frame (the color, I don’t need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger’s horse) … slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself—the best of friends, the true sons of the Estate, its heirs by right of birth—Sonny with the slow innocence he had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous secret knowledge—yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring. “Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!”
    On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round … gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels.
    Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip … “More to come, ya zeroes!” she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. “Targets! More targets!”—and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in toothbraces—nobody dared question her